Everything and the Mobile Software Universe…

All this Ajax/Web 2.0/New Application Framework/Google are all about a big change in the CPU power repartition: Today PC is king, so CPU power is, defacto, at the network periphery…. But … as it was the case years ago, before the PC era, this power is coming back near the “center”, and this exellent article from Wired Magazine, found via Open-Gardens, depicts it pretty well:

The cloud architecture and mobile browsing applications ..

Wired 14.10: The Information Factories

A verbose wired article as per link above speaks of the ‘Internet cloud’. It can be summarised as

The desktop is dead. Welcome to the Internet cloud, where massive facilities across the globe will store all the data you’ll ever use. George Gilder on the dawning of the petabyte age.

The cloud architecture and mobile browsing applications ..

And what to say about those Sun and Google “overnight datacenters” like mini-CPU power plants, autonomous, you put like vampire s(hum I disgress, I disgress) on the net backbone to bring computing/memory power anywhere:

Google’s Global Super-structure

Cringely breaks the silence on the rumors of a major Google innovation – worldwide datacenters in a box (actually a shipping container).

Got Ads?: Google’s Global Super-structure – Google AdWords and Overture PPC

At the end all of this may have a HUGE impact on mobile computing, quoting the last Mobile Opportunity entry about Smartphones and PC overlapp:

No, the realistic scenario is that PCs and smartphones (and other mobile devices to come) will prosper in parallel for years, each doing its own thing increasingly well. There will be some overlap at the edges, but the core usage of each product will remain very distinct. Meanwhile, the web apps platform will continue to gradually eat away at both operating systems, transforming them into commoditized plumbing that few people care about.

Mobile Opportunity: Will the smartphone kill the PC?

Yes I fully agree on this, and I share also the following point of view with Michael Mace:

The development tools for creating web apps, and the features of the web platform itself, are not currently as sophisticated and powerful as the traditional programming environments like Windows and Mac OS. So you can’t create a fully functional clone of Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop with the current state of the art in web tools. This is shielding the big software companies from immediate competition in their core businesses, and often produces a false sense of security.

However, the web platform is evolving much faster than the old-style operating systems. At some point it is inevitable that the web platform will become mature enough that web apps can challenge the established software standards. At that point, the swarming little web 2.0 application companies will fall all over themselves to take bites out of those lucrative franchises.

Rubicon Consulting, Inc. – Our Thinking – Newsletter – Understanding the full impact of the web

And this is precisely where I really see things evolving, see my post about those new “modern” frameworks. Some key elements are still missing, like micro formats, data standardization, behaviour abstraction for easy application deployment and mashup, but once reached the Holly Grail of complete uncorrelation between representation, control and data (hey MVC again), it could be possible to have applications written “in pieces”: I’m not an advocate of the “write once run everywhere”, in the Mobile space applications have to be so much taylored, adapted to the hardware, customizable and so on, that being able to have a common part, “written once, run on a server” and a customized one for each kind of device/Operator may be of high value…and those new frameworks may be the key (hum the beginning of the key to be exact ).
So next generation Mobile frameworks may have a very clean MVC abstraction, based on a standard that still doesn’t exist:

• The representation (View) should be optimized for the hardware, cause representation has to run locally. Javascript is not a good candidate, perhpas xml or even binary description are better suited
• The Control part is also really tied to the available user input/output and a part has to run locally
• The other part and the Data model should be of course on the server, with the big algorithms and processing

Of course everything will work smoothly if the network lag/answer time reduces greatly, but for sure it will come with next gen wireless networks.
A good example of such a modern application, appart from the today basic web 2.0 widgets, would be a Mapping/GPS appliction where the card and route computation are on the server and the data display and GPS infromation are on the device …hum Orange is already providing something like that with Webraska….let’s move on with other example! Do you have some? Any Comments?

Update: Thanks to AC/OS for the Sun data center link. Check those Sun prototypes…wow.

Update2: I’ve managed to found the article talking about google plan, looking like the Sun one.

Just a little post to share this good news :GSM Association Press Release 2006 – Microimage & Open-Plug Take Top Prizes at Inaugural Asian Mobile Innovation Awards…great!

In this blog we talk a lot about developpement frameworks in the mobile space, which are close to “traditional” framework (like GNOME, Qt, Windows, MacOS, even Java in less extent), but newcomers are popping … from the web space.
I’ve played recently with a great CMS (hum : a blog engine on steroid) Drupal to developp as quickly as possible an in-house test cases/release quality report system for our test teams, a weekly tracking tool for my team and some other stuffs: I’m NOT a php/javascript/XML/HTML junky, I’m a C/C++/algorithmics dev, and … doing that was EASY and FAST, and I must say efficient.
The biggest positive points that have popped out:

• Documentation of PHP/Drupal : amazing, clear, dense, …neat
• Data formalization (RSS feeds and XML)
• Powerfull presentation framework that let me concentrate on the job

If we compare those point to exisitng frameworks, some are really missing : Documentation of course is not only many time missing, but when it is present, it has been written by code monkeys, certainly good at coding and architecture, but not for teaching and giving fun (I’ll quote here one of my Kathy Sierra favorite post never underestimate the power of fun). Data formalization: it is a joke today in the C/C++ world, where is easy serialization? Database?. Presentation framework : ok you have some exisitng but you still have to fight with widget mechanics…boring and bug prone.

It is where new web frameworks may bring something new, I’ve spotted 2 at this time:

• Ruby on Rails
• OpenLaszlo (found again via TomSoft)

Ruby on Rails is really pushing the MVC (Model View Controller see my post here and here) paradigm to its limits, with a clean high level language….I’ll try to use it as soon as possible.

OpenLaszlo claims to bring the desktop power to web applications … and the approach seems greats (look at the examples) : the UI is described in clean XML, then everything is compiled in Flash or DHTML, AJAX stuff/javascript are hidden.

So it will be time to bring this kind of technologies to mobile developement … and constraints… Flash today is perhaps too RAM and CPU consuming (but I’m sure it will change). Making things too easy has also its drawbacks, especially in an area where customization is a key differenciator, see also this Kathy’s post about ease of use.

At Open-Plug we already have a clean, all recoded GTK that is running on Ultra Low Cost phones with no issues, for me the next step would be to add some more formal and high level UI descriptions, and some better data modeling to come close…We have begun, and it is exciting!

A little post to share this news with you :alarm:clock euro: OpenPlug Raises €15M And Other Fresh Euro Deals Archives
(Perhaps) As you know we are pushing really hard to bring something new to mobile phone software developpement and integration … this will definitively allow us to go even further! … a little of self satifaction is sometime a good thing after some pizzas/release nights .
Update : Fred Destin talks about us also…
Update 2: A mixed comment about OpenPlug Strategy good read even if, of course I disagree on some points:-)

I’m happy to see that in France we are not anymore a third world country in respect to broadband access, and I really think it is thanks to the ADSL operator Free who is always pushing the envelop for new technologies (triple and even quadruple play, Freebox HD…) followed by the others, forced to play the technology game (orange, neuf, alice and club internet above all).
It is why it is really great seeing new Wifi/GSM telephony offers: Neuf/Cegetel Twin, Orange Unik, and Free offer (some photos of the Free phones).
It is why reading this new from the exellent MobileCrunch was not a surprise:
MobileCrunch » T-Mobile Announces Launch of UMA, Dual Mode Handsets … this seems to be a big trend with wifi expanding quickly at home. The Kineto Wireless white paper is really worth a read to understand the involved technologies. Only the Orange offer seems to be really UMA compliant with a clean handover from Wifi to GSM (but not the other way round…)
The Free approach to give everyone 2 MIMO boxes is really wize: in big citie the Free Wifi coverage will be amazing …
Update: MobileCrunch has post a new article about UMA.

After the BenQ Black Box, Here is the Nokia one … with no button either (seen on pdafrance)

Update: It seems that TomSoft has been quicker than me on this one

GSM Association Press Release 2006 – GSMA announces shortlist for the first Asia Mobile Innovation Awards We are really proud to be part of this shortlist!

Linux not ready for mobile phones, Nokia exec says and this about some experiments they are working on: Nokia turns cellphones into webservers
This is pretty interesting and gave a good balance to the “all on linux” message.
At the end, what really matters are the services offered by th eplateform, and not the kernel…if you have the malloc/fopen/socket functions, do you really care if there is a linux kernel to implement the functions ? Guess no, only the services and their description are relevant, not their implementation, to digg this idea, see my post: Does mobile OS matters : no, it’s all about function. in response to this great one at Mobile Opportunity.
So nokia wants to run some “open-source” services (a browser, Apache) on their phones … and has realized that Linux is NOT mandatory to do that.
To come back to the web server article, I’ll quote the following:

[...]

• Interactive, contextual, and location-dependent content
  • Use the phone as a webcam
  • Find other mobile web sites in the proximity
  • Find out the location of a mobile website (cellid)
• Enabling new communication means without operator involvement
  • Send instant message
  • Leave instant message in the inbox
  • Leave a note on a mobile weblog
• Access core data
  • Access favorites, contacts, calendar, logs, and messages
  • Download images
  • Mount a read-write view of the root webserver directory and edit pages directly using WebDAV

[...]

The second point is particularly interesting: no need of the operator nor centralized servers to create services…the phone makers are back in the game to master as much as possible user content and phone usage…For me many things can be read between the lines with this experiment, pretty exciting to say the least!
Any comments are welcomed!

YouTube – MIT sketching
enjoy:

I have coded an application on palm that was able to tranform sketches in geometrical forms … but this one is really great, mixing physics and so one, nice touch! (ie : I have to work in those areas someday )

Here is a list of false good ideas for start ups: Rondam Ramblings: Top ten geek business myths. Really worth a read, found via the excellent LifeHack.org … and I must confess that we have to face some of the items of this list …but we are not in a so bad shape either!
Here is the summed-up list:

• Myth #1: A brilliant idea will make you rich. Perhaps not rich … but its realization may be lead to a lot of fun…and money can come after that
• Myth #2: If you build it they will come. FOR SURE, building is one thing (my part), selling it is another, at least as important: it’s what we’ve learnt it, both have to be well balanced.
• Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don’t protect it. I really agree with this one, ideas are floating, people are changing jobs, etc…
• Myth #4: What you think matters. Hum, not sure about this: if my CEO doesn’t think that, I’ll begin to worry …
• Myth #5: Financial models are bogus.??? How to do without? How to convince VC’s?
• Myth #6: What you know matters more than who you know. This one is more balanced for me, both crucial
• Myth #7: A Ph.D. means something. Hum this is a so US comment, in France a PhD is not a big deal for sure, compared to a “Grande Ecole”, anyway yes, studies ARE important, to show strong abstarction power (so synthetical mind) and culture (for vision)
• Myth #8: I need $5 million to start my business Depends on what you want to build …but you need money if you wan’t to be more than 2 people in a garage.
• Myth #9: The idea is the most important part of my business plan. It is only a part.
• Myth #10: Having no competition is a good thing. Completely agreed. Your Competitor shows that there is a market, and help greatly your positioning.
• Special bonus myth (free with your paid subscription): After the IPO I’ll be happy. I hope I’ll be able to comment on this one someday